On The Notebook

“The notebook is where our interior world makes contact with our exterior world; where our instinct for creation is first made material. Our notebooks are our first messy attempts at self-expression, and the ways in which we express ourselves are changing every day.” Sarah Gerardexplores the life of the notebook in an essay for Hazlitt. Pair with our own Hannah Gersen‘s look at other methods writers use to keep their ideas straight, from calendars to collages.

The diary novel may be "an under-attended" genre, but Johannah King-Slutzky is trying to remedy that. In an essay for The Hairpin she traces the diary novel's history from the Victorian era to Go Ask Alice while examining the genre's balance of "melodrama and awkward moralizing" with the potential for subversion.

This handy guide from The Week shows how to identify which website a headline comes from, from Gawker to The New York Times. Pair with Janet Potter'sMillions piece on rewriting book titles to get more clicks.

Is envy really the worst form of pettiness, as Kierkegaard suggested? Maybe. The great Roman philosopher Cicero had his own, fairly radical thoughts on envy -- namely, that "compassion and envy are consistent in the same man; for whoever is uneasy at any one’s adversity is also uneasy at another’s prosperity."

Back in 2008, Patti Smithkicked off an exhibition with a reading of Virginia Woolf’sThe Waves. It may not surprise you to learn that the punk legend, after getting through one sentence, broke into “free improvisation.”